Tony Stubblebine

CEO @ Medium. Early Twitter user, like really, really early. Some people call me Coach Tony. Partner is Sarah. Dog is Eloise.

Medium: https://coachtony.medium.com

Last Notes

2025-05-28 17:03:04 UTC

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I never got any sense of media agenda from Ben in the tiny bit of overlap or in the tales of company history.
But even if so, they have no say now and if based on other investments probably have a small financial incentive for Medium to fail.

2025-05-28 17:01:58 UTC

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Yeah, that all started changing over the last few years and I can give you an official update.
A) there are zero VCs on the board right now or with rights to appoint a board seat.
B) I took over in 2022 and Ben left before I had my first board meeting. Kevin had left long before that.
C) we did a full recap in April 2023 and at that point A16Z lost a lot of their equity position and lost all of their preferred stock (converted to common).

2025-05-18 15:03:05 UTC

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Regarding Medium implementing ActivityPub. I've lost track of my canonical post on this, but I just personally hate the use case. I get that this isn't universal.
I think social media platforms are separate communities with separate community norms and that syndicating from one into another is offensive.
If a Medium author wants their stories here they should create a post and wrap the link with some context.

2025-05-18 14:59:38 UTC

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But now I think it's shaken out fine. X, Threads, and BSky are going to be the big town squares. Mastodon will be smaller but the communities that are here will be stronger.
Thinking to our writers--big fish in a small pond is a good strategy for them. They'd all be better off looking for strong community.

2025-03-24 13:51:48 UTC

The landscape of external traffic has flipped around in the last few years. Here's a viral post that slayed on Threads, and did pretty well on BSky, but didn't get anything from formerly important aggregators like Pocket.
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/114/217/731/102/837/380/original/e24b76fe2c74c42d.png

2024-08-21 19:05:07 UTC

My keynote from Medium Day. It was overall a pretty positive message but I also didn't shy away from what's broken on the Internet.
https://blog.medium.com/state-of-medium-c54d1706a9b4

2024-06-06 21:56:17 UTC

I ❤️ paywalls